Toy vehicles have long provided children fun and exciting entertainment. Moreover, providing mechanisms to propel a toy vehicle adds to the enjoyment of playing with a toy vehicle, often allowing the toy vehicle to travel faster and farther than if simply pushed by the child playing with the toy.
Toy vehicles have previously been provided that utilize a pull cord, often including a rack gear, to energize a drive system that ultimately launches the toy vehicle. Toy vehicle launch assemblies of varying complexity have been provided that allow the user to manually operate such a pull cord, and thus manually control the amount of energy that is imparted to the toy vehicle through the launcher's drive drain, in turn allowing the user to have some effect on the speed at which the toy vehicle launches from the launcher. For instance, both U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,701,216 and 7,500,898 disclose hand-held launchers that launch a wheel, using a gear rack to rotate an output shaft on the launcher to which the wheel attaches. Likewise, U.S. Pat. No. 4,483,096 discloses a toy vehicle energizer and launcher having a pull cord that rotates an internal drive spool on the launcher, which in turn energizes a drive wheel of the toy vehicle through a clutch mechanism. Further, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0121820 discloses a toy propeller launcher having a stationary base that receives a rack gear to engage an internal drive train, which in turn rotates separate launch assemblies to aerially launch toy propellers from each of the launch assemblies.
While manual control, and particularly manual activation and launching of the toy vehicle may be more desirable than, for instance, trigger-spring actuated or motorized launchers (as such manual control creates a more challenging and exciting experience for the user), the above-described prior art devices have provided the user only the opportunity to engage a launcher for the toy vehicle, and not the toy vehicle themselves. Such direct engagement with the toy vehicles themselves can be more desirable to further add to the player's direct control of the action of the toy vehicle as it launches.
Other prior art configurations have been provided for launching such toy vehicles in which a pull cord, typically including a rack gear, directly engages the toy vehicle in a direction generally parallel to the intended path of the toy vehicle. While this configuration may allow more direct control by the user of the action of the toy vehicle as it is launched, it limits the user's ability to adequately position multiple toy vehicles for simultaneous launch, which may be particularly desirable when playing with such toy vehicles in a racing environment. More particularly, separate players must separately engage their pull cord with their respective toy vehicle, and if there is to be an aligned starting line, do their best to align their toy vehicles in a side-by-side position before launching and attempt to hold such position steady during the launching pull. Further, as positioning, holding, and launching of such vehicles in this type of racing configuration requires two hands, a user is limited to either finding a racing partner to control the second toy vehicle, or not being able to play with such toy vehicles in a play racing setting.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a toy vehicle having a configuration allowing manual launching by the user through direct engagement with the toy vehicle (as opposed to engagement through a separate launcher), but that allows multiple toy vehicles to be launched simultaneously by a single user, and that particularly allows multiple toy vehicles to be manually launched by a single user from an aligned starting position.